Featured Domains

There’s one new top level domain name entering general availability this week: .Pet from Afilias launches on Tuesday.

The good news for pet lovers is that they won’t have to pay much to get Fido a domain name. Registrars I checked this morning are charging $12-$15 for .pet domains, about the same as a .com.

This isn’t the first opportunity for animals to register a domain name. Over 5,000 people have registered .dog domains and .Fish has over 3,000 registrations. And of course animal doctors can register a .Vet domain name.

Fido and Mittens also had the potential to be able to register .pets, but an objection panel found that it might cause confusion with .pet. If you’ve ever seen a cat type, I think you’ll agree with the panelist on this decision.

Another panelist finds that .pet and .pets are too similar to both be delegated as top level domain names

How many pets are there?

Apparently two panelists agree: .Pets and .Pet should be in a contention set because they’ll cause confusion amongst internet users.

International Centre for Dispute Resolution just posted a decision (pdf) by panelist Richard Page for Google’s objection to Donuts’ application for .pets.

Google argued that having both .pet and .pets as top level domain names would cause confusion and thus applications for the different domains should be placed in a contention set. Page agreed.

Google provided specific examples of how this would cause confusion, including when heard instead of written:

It is probable that internet users and consumers will be informed of an email address, such as adoption@dog.pet and adopt@dog.pets, and will confuse the two TLDs. It is also probable that Internet users and consumer will hear advertisements on radio, television and other media, such as “Buy toys for your pet at TOYS.PET,” and “Adopt toy-sized pets at TOYS.PETS,” only to confuse the two TLDs.

The decision was actually made on August 14, but for some reason was just posted online today. Afilias, another applicant for .pet, also won its objection against Donuts application.

Barring intervention by ICANN, this means that Google, Afilias, and Donuts will all have to duke it out to run their .pet or .pets domain.